The Prosecutor

Eric Holder Jr. was trained long ago in crime and punishment. He grew up in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, N.Y.--so populated by cops and firefighters that rush hour looked like the shift change at a station house. A popular teen prank was setting off the red fire-alarm box near his modest brick house on 101st Street. Nearly everyone tried it once, but not Eric, the churchgoing Boy Scout who knew the consequence of disobeying rules: "A good, quick smack on the bottom," his mother Miriam recalls. "If you did something wrong, you're going to have to pay a price."

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That rule guided Holder after he left Queens to become a corruption prosecutor, municipal judge and U.S. Attorney. And it will probably guide him as the nation's 82nd Attorney General. Holder takes over a sprawling, 110,000-person Justice Department that was treated at times like a private law firm by the Bush Administration, both in its novel interpretation of the law and in the way it purged employees who did not share its political views. Returning to the department he helped run in the late 1990s, Holder invited all employees to his grand fifth-floor office to introduce themselves. "It's good to be back," he said in remarks sent around the building.

But Holder faces huge challenges and a ticking clock as the nation's top lawyer. The most urgent is how to implement President Barack Obama's decision to close the brig at Guantánamo in a year and try some 250 alleged terrorists who have been kept there indefinitely. Some of their cases are so sensitive that presenting evidence in open court could compromise national security. As details of Bush-era practices on rendition, torture and wiretapping become known, Holder will have to rewrite some of the most secret rules of engagement used by the U.S. against al-Qaeda while balancing Democrats calling for the prosecution of Bush officials who authorized those policies. Though Obama would rather look forward and not back, Holder promised in his confirmation hearings to "follow the evidence, the facts, the law and let that take us where it should."